Governance of the Vocational Personality in the Origins of Vocational Guidance

The paper represents part of a larger project, a genealogy of the vocational personality (Arthy, 1996a) which documents a particular history of educational practices in Australia. The aim of the geneal-ogy is to show how the expertise of subjectivity in shaping the voca-tional personality, a specific form of the useful and good citizen, has become fundamental to our contemporary ways of being governed and of governing ourselves. The term “expertise of subjectivity ” refers to what Rose (1990) identified as the multiplying powers of the engi-neers of the human soul, psychologists, social workers, personnel managers, probation officers, counselors, and therapists. As a history of practices, this genealogy of the vocational person-ality is not presented as a history of reflections upon the nature of the soul but as a scientific discourse within a body of social practices which deal with changing conceptions of pathologies of thought, be-lief, intellect, emotion, and conduct. Following Rose (1985, 1988, 1990 and 1995), it is to the conceptions and practices of government, regu-lation, surveillance, segregation, and therapy within which they were deployed that must be examined if the conditions that make the con-temporary expertise of vocational guidance possible to identi&. This project is not a history of ideas, but a history of practices, techniques, institutions, and agencies including the forms of knowledge which made them thinkable and which they, in their turn, were transposed from an ethical register of a Christian mutuality pattern between work and society into a technical register based on the expertise of individual psychology. In the governance of the vocational personality in post-war Australia, vocational guidance has become a practice which has constructed its technical norms in accordance with an ethi-cal and cultural register based on a Christian mutuality pattern be